It is incredibly exciting to announce that today we found out that our grassroots project, which started as an idea and meeting at an open government unconference, is getting some incredible support to grow and sustain over the next few years. I’ve shared our experiences, and the support that has been growing from academic institutions, companies, foundations, and within our own community.

Today we announced that CrisisCommons is receiving $1.2 million in grant funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, through the Woodrow Wilson Center, to spend the next two years providing support between the volunteer technology community and crisis response and development organizations.

Over the last year of supporting numerous local CrisisCamps in developing mobile, data, analysis, mapping and other tools supporting the response to the Haiti earthquake, Pakistan floods, Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill, and other regional crisis events we’ve learned a lot of lessons. In particular, there is consistently a “crisis crowd” that seeks to provide aid and assistance through expertise, information sharing, and technology development. However, organizations have difficulty in conveying their needs, or adopting solutions that fit appropriate security, quality, and usability metrics.

Through this support, CrisisCommons will be building out technology infrastructure support, in coordination with the Oregon State Open Source Lab, that will host projects and CrisisCamps. Research fellows will be made available to develop analysis and recommendations in event response and development that will help shape the future of volunteer technology community response and adoption in crisis events. And members of response organizations will be convened with the many open-source projects to collaborate, share experiences, needs, and develop better partnerships that will hopefully positively impact how crisis response occurs.

The community has been amazing, and the response to each and every event and camp unique and compelling – it’s just the beginning. We couldn’t have hoped for a better outcome from a completely emergent and very organic phenomenon. Thank you!

Read more about the grant on the CrisisCommons blog.

I’m enroute to the mile-high city of Denver that boasts a plethora of geo-talent for WhereCamp5280. Today there is a ‘hackfest‘ at CU Denver Campus, then on Friday a full day of discussion, brainstorming and defining the future of geo.

It’s almost half-way between Where2.0 and WhereCamp5280 is stacked to be an interesting discussion of the current state of affairs in what has been called “the year of location”. And given the cadre of people that will be coming to WhereCamp5280, such as Waze, MapQuest, WeoGeo, Safe, Google, USGS, ESRI, numerous other geo-geniuses, and of course, a cadre of FortiusOne engineers – we definitely should have some fascinating discussions. I hope if you’re nearby you can make it too!

This week I attended and spoke at the Humanitarian Disaster Coordination workshop held at UVA’s Darden School of Business. Focused primarily on the role of logistics in response activities, organizations such as DHS/FEMA, UPS, US Coast Guard, American Red Cross, and academic institutions like LSU and Michigan State University shared their experiences in supporting the emergent, dynamic, and chaotic operations of distributing resources. The topics for this workshop primarily focused on Demand Signal Visibility – who needs what, where?

I found the world of crisis supply chain operations fascinating in the complexities of moving something like tents to remote areas of China or even locally like Louisiana. There is a very complex landscape of Federal, State, and Local government, VOADs (Voluntary Organizations Acting in Disaster) such as Red Cross, FBOs (Faith Based Organizations) such as Salvation Army, and the Military. And that’s not even considering the complex organizational and operational processes within these organizations. Clearly the effect is a working, but highly inefficient and potential fragile operational capacity in responding to disasters. The flood of unwanted in-kind donations (as high as 90% of donated goods need to be discarded because they are unusable), competing interests, conflicting operations, and communications issues result in frustration and a concern that in a catastrophic disaster – particularly within the United States – that we would be ill-prepared to respond effectively.

However, these organizations are very interested in understanding how they can better coordinate and collaborate. There is a clear realization of the need to put in place better plans before a disaster occurs. The entire purpose of the workshop was to convene the different communities of government, military, NGO, private industry, and academia in order to share difficulties and brainstorm solutions.

Emerging Trends

In particular, my talk shared the emerging drivers, trends, and issues in information sharing and collaboration in humanitarian activities. Major events from Katrina, through Haiti earthquake and reconstruction have highlighted that citizen engagement through digital media is dramatically changing the on-the-ground needs sharing and response capabilities. Traditional crisis response organizations currently utilize a very top-down approach, be that at the “local” level of first responders in the country or region – but also through national efforts led by FEMA – that is being faced with these trends but currently not clear on how to incorporate the data. “Social Media” is currently primarily supported through external affairs and is considered a publicity mechanism. However, as was made clear in the recent American Red Cross Survey, 74% of the polled adults expect less than a 1-hour response to their need when published through a service such as Twitter or Facebook.

Open Sharing

The internet has provided a global, connected network that dramatically lowers the barrier to free exchange of data. Administrative policies focused on open-government, combined with general acceptance that shared data improves the quality and grows value is leading organizations to more readily share their data – particularly with open-standards.

Realtime Data

Inexpensive, connected, and prevalent mobile devices are dramatically increasing the number of ’sensor nodes’ that are publishing data continuously to the web. Social media, resource tracking, news, weather and climate sensors are all providing continous streams of data that have a huge value in providing situational awareness and communications.

Analytics

In order to understand the deluge of information, analysis tools are being put closer to users – particularly domain experts and locally situated groups that

Social Networks

People are connecting and collaborating through online networks, bridging social, family, professional and local communities. They’re able to communicate in real-time about issues they care about.

Crisis Crowds

Around any crisis, communities of interest – diaspora, family, and general good will – is causing people to want to actively participate in helping the survivors.

New sensor platforms

Mobile phones, Texting, broadband internet allow anyone, anywhere to be sharing data and providing information and feedback. In addition, inexpensive digital devices are allowing people to build ad-hoc balloon imaging and other sensing platforms.

‘Citizen’ Engagement

Combined, all of these capabilities are actually allowing the local, affected populations to have an immediate, positive impact on their response. Neighbors and communities are able to assist one another and coordinate with official response organizations.

Work we’re doing

Groups like CrisisCommons have a lot to offer as it combines members of these response organizations with technologists, private industry, and citizens in developing agile and supportive capabilities. In the workshop it became clear of the potential and growing need to utilize digital media as part of operational support and not just as public outreach. Integrating aggregation, analysis, and curation tools of the huge flows of data are vital to organizations so that they can understand their own operational picture as well as the broader ‘common operating picture’ across the entire disaster.

At FortiusOne, we’ve built GeoIQ to integrate dynamic data such as Twitter and Flickr with logistics information of shelters, hospitals and other infrastructure to provide these common operating pictures both within organizations as well as on the ground through field-deployed systems. GeoCommons has served as a tremendous repository of data and information analysis that augments these operations by providing to the general public the capability to contribute and share these analyses.

Disaster response is changing quickly – information technology playing a key role in quickly augmenting local and remote capabilities. The future is in combining these with actual logistics of materials through the international and national responders to be more effective and supportive.

Back in February of this year we worked with the World Bank, USAID, and CrisisCommons to deploy a large amount of map imagery and tiles to the Haitian Government and clusters working in relief. We included a forked version of crschmidt’s haitibrowser to work offline on USB sticks.

One of the issues we encountered were the vast amount of pre-rendered tile images that needed to be moved to the device. The overall size was not that large – in the hundreds of megabytes. It was the number of files that caused issues in copying and replicated these USB sticks in order to aid in the proliferation of data.

I’ve long been an ardent supporter of SQLite and Spatialite as Open Data containers for geospatial data. It’s a portable, offline, open standard, relational data store that provides great access and compression. About a year ago we even added Spatialite support to GeoCommons – so anyone can convert data to a SQLite database.

Almost exactly three years ago, Mikel put OSM on the iPhone after realizing that Apple was using SQLite to store the tile cache for maps. It makes simple sense to put blobs of images inside a table schema for fast storage and retrieval.

Earlier this week Development Seed released a command-line toolset called MBTiles to bundle tiles into SQLite. You can get the source code here. It’s great to finally have the beginnings of a set of tools to better utilize SQLite for storing and sharing tilesets.

Chris Schmidt has shared his ideas and added broadening support to TileCache in support of storing tiles in SQLite so that anyone using TileCache can now easily load tiles offline.

I’m excited to see more adoption of easy mechanisms for interchanging data – raster and vector. We have a couple of ideas and things brewing in how to combine these tiles with other vector data as well as rendering that could really provide some good mechanisms for open spatial data stores.

This week was many months in the making. Since Spring of this year, the engineering team at FortiusOne has been very hard at work writing a major refactor of GeoIQ, the underlying platform behind GeoCommons. Originally, GeoIQ was actually three web applications that communicated to one another over HTTP REST interfaces. In many ways it was an elegant solution but also an element of pre-mature architecture. HTTP is not a good medium for very high-rate communications and we found a lot of redundant code in the corresponding Finder, Maker, and Core applications. Besides this, the separation of functionality was a decent user experience detriment. Besides the plaform refactoring we also had a major refactoring of the visualization of (the app formerly known as) Maker.

The end result is a much more streamlined, and maintainable platform. On Sunday we deployed this update to GeoCommons and already you can see an improvement. In addition, implemented a number of new capabilities that we’ll be rolling out over the next few weeks. The first one we’ve released is temporal visualization. Similar to spatial panning of the geographic area, you can now pan and animate through time as well. We’ve extended the brewer process to ask users to let us know which attributes to use in the visualization. More on that to come.

Another major effort of our work in relaunching the GeoIQ platform was sharing an early edition of the GeoIQ API. ProgrammableWeb covered the news and highlighted the data management, thematic visualization, and analysis methods that are available. It is all based on REST so should be straight-forward for developers to dive in and start building applications. We’ve also completely wrapped the Map visualization with a JavaScript interface for control on the interactivity and styling of the map and controls. You can now programmatically create your choropleth maps with animated twitter streams – or whatever you want – in a few lines of code.

We already have a number of clients building on our API, so we thought the rest of the World should too. You’ll start seeing some major organizations launching GeoIQ enabled sites and tools in the next few months – prepare for an onslaught of open geodata and collaboration.

Give the new GeoCommons a try. We’re excited to hear your feedback, ideas, and thoughts on additional things we should be providing for you.